Cold Case Sheriff
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Tara Taylor Quinn
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23
Chapter 1
The address was right. She’d checked the GPS four times. It insisted she’d arrived at her destination. She’d passed the number directly preceding the one she’d found in her aunt’s things.
And the one after, too, before turning around.
She’d arrived at her destination.
There was no house.
How could there be no house?
No sign of a house ever having been there. Not even a dirt driveway leading off the road. Just rocky dirt and semidesert grassland. Nothing at all familiar. She’d swear on all of her possessions, even the heart of her heart—the fine, one-of-a-kind-work-of-art store she’d inherited from her aunt—that she’d never been on that plot of land before.
Why would her aunt have kept this address for Aimee’s mother tucked away in her safe? Had the woman Aimee barely remembered, the woman who’d given birth to her in the small Arizona town, owned the land? Hoped to build on it someday?
Had she been robbed of the chance by the car accident that had taken both of her parents’ lives?
Or...with horrifying clarity she glanced around...was this the spot where the drunk driver had hit her parents head-on? Was she standing on the ground where they’d been killed?
That would explain why she had no memories of the place.
And the explanation would allow her to keep alive the hope that the nightmarish dreams she’d been having recently could still find resolution in Evergreen. Just not at the address she’d expected to elicit them.
Still, she couldn’t just leave. Not if that view was the last her parents had ever seen. No one knew where they’d been the day they’d been killed. Only that they’d said they’d had an appointment that Saturday afternoon they’d left her with a sitter. And that they’d be gone a couple of hours...
Hours that had turned into forever.
Had they kissed her goodbye before they’d departed for their mystery meeting? Or had she been too busy playing to notice their leaving for the last time?
Hugging her arms around herself as she glanced about, Aimee, shook her head. Ever since her aunt’s shockingly unexpected accidental death the previous month, she’d been living in a mental and emotional space that was surreal. As though she’d been transported out of life as she’d known it to be, and into some paranormal zone where nothing was as it seemed.
It kind of made sense that Aunt Bonnie’s tragic accident had brought forth buried memories from her past. The first section of her life had ended with a tragic accident. The time from birth to three when she’d been the adored daughter of two loving parents. Part of the stereotypical family dream.
Then had come section two. Growing up the adored niece of a loving perennially single artistic aunt. Which had also ended with tragedy.
Now came part three. In a travel-crumpled spandex midthigh-length black skirt, white T-shirt and glitzy flip-flops, she was standing on a Friday morning in early June beside a rental car on the side of a road in Evergreen, Arizona with no real plan of execution. Except some half-baked idea that her recent onslaught of nightmares could somehow be put to rest there.
Alongside another not quite rational notion that a part of her had been lost or left behind in the secluded little northern Arizona town and until she found it she’d never get to section four of her life. The part where she finally fell in love with an eligible bachelor—something she’d failed to do in the fourteen years she’d been dating—and got married. Had children of her own.
And became another statistic in the stereotypical family count.
Something that sounded a whole lot better than all alone in the world.
Something that had seemed like a far away magical dream even when she hadn’t been all alone.
A vehicle whizzed past. Black. Big. Expensive looking. The first she’d seen since she’d been out on the deserted side road, alone with nature as far as she could see.
The trees weren’t like the ones back home. She recognized some oak and aspen...but fewer of them than she was used to seeing. The leaves weren’t as big and lush and...
That tree...
Off to the left of her. A good two hundred yards in from where she was standing...heart pumping, she stared...
Slowly, her gaze swept upward and...
Aimee held on as tightly as she could, ’cept her fingers didn’t reach all around the ropes like he’d told her to do. He pushed from behind her and up she went, ’til she could see the branches way up in the sky. Curvy. Like...
“No!” A man’s voice. In front of them. Coming closer. “What are you doing?” She knew the voice. Was scared at the way it sounded. And...whee...she came back down with a flip-flop in her belly and up she went again.
And then...he was crying.
Her head was shaking. Back and forth. No. No. No!
Becoming aware of the movement, Aimee stopped it. Immediately. Raised her hand up to smooth her short shock of wild and windblown-looking, textured dark hair, and noticed that the rest of her was shaky, too. Her hands. Her knees.
And her stomach...she was slightly nauseated. Which made no sense. She’d had her normal bagel for breakfast that morning in the Flagstaff airport before renting the car. She’d known she’d need to adjust to the new time zone and had purposely waited to sleep during the long flight and eat when she landed.
It wasn’t lunchtime yet.
Standing alone beside her parked rental car just outside Evergreen, Arizona, on this balmy June day, Aimee tried to draw in a long, deep, healing breath. And shuddered, instead.
She couldn’t possibly be remembering something real. She’d only been three when she’d left, she reminded herself. And the dreams...they’d had images, but hadn’t included anything even vaguely familiar to the plot of land on which she stood. Or to the little drama that had just assaulted her.
But that tree...the way the branches formed an outward vee and then circled inward, back toward each other...
She could fall! You’re going to hurt her!
I... I never...wouldn’t...hurt her...
Aimee blinked and was standing alone at the edge of an unfamiliar vacant lot. Just as she’d been for the past several minutes. Alone and scared.
What was wrong with her? What was happening?
Was she...like...on some kind of psychotic break? Having visions now, to go along with the nightmares?
Yeah, Aunt Bonnie’s death had been a shock. And the hardest thing she’d ever had to live through. But people lost loved ones. They didn’t generally lose their minds over it.
She certainly wasn’t going to do so. She was taking action. Taking control. That’s why she was in Evergreen.
The little pep talk helped still the shaking inside her for a second or two.
Helped her clamp down on the doubts. She was not having an emotional breakdown because she was all alone in the world. Trying to rediscover all that she’d lost as a means of not feeling so alone.
There was something there. Something in Evergreen.
There had to be.
Determined to prove it to herself, she ignored the clearly-posted no trespassing signs, stepped off the road and onto the land. One step. Then two. And kept walking. Toward the tree. Since it was calling to her, she’d start there. There was no thought about whose property she could be on. No care given to the possibility of trespassing. She had to take action.
To confront the strange seemingly realistic images that, until those last few minutes, had only been present in her dreams. They weren’t going to get the better of her. To rob her of the one thing she had left—herself. She’d made the decision to seek them out.
Walking more swiftly now, traversing the uneven ground as though it was blacktop and she was in tennis shoes, instead of bejeweled flip-flops, she dared herself to find something, anything, that would make sense of her presence in Evergreen.
Or of that particular address. After she checked into the little cabin-like summer home she’d rented for the month, she’d head to the courthouse. Find tax records for the property. She’d already tried to find them online, of course. Evergreen hadn’t converted to online public access.
And if that didn’t give her any answers she’d...
Crack! Crack!
Aimee dove for the ground, as something whizzed past her, close enough that she could see the trajectory. Lying flat on her belly, she sucked in to make herself as small as she could, praying that any more of the bullets she’d just heard would continue to miss her.
Lying there in the deafening silence that followed the two booms, she slowed her breathing, keeping it as inobtrusive as she could, awaiting her fate.
Seconds seemed like days. And then turned into minutes.
Rocks dug into her, bruising a hip bone; dirt held her face, and a piece of straw-like grass was making her lip itch. Growing more and more aware of her immediate discomfort, she continued to wait. Until so much time passed that she realized she was going to have to come up with another plan.
Running for her car seemed like the best bet. It was harder to hit moving targets. And the car was her only hope of a package deal of cover and escape.
Assuming someone was after her for trespassing. She was doing that.
Maybe whoever shot the gun thought she was dead. If she got up and ran, he’d know she wasn’t. But she’d have more of a chance of living if she was running, than if he came up to her, stood over her and found out she was alive...
Up and running like the wind on that last thought, Aimee darted back and forth, making a zigzagged line to her car, in case there were bullets to avoid.
None came.
On the road side of the car, she sank down for a second, on her haunches, trying to get her breath. To slow the shaking in her hands long enough to pull the rental key from the pocket of her skirt. To wait and see if there would be another shower of bullets.
When none were forthcoming, she climbed carefully into the car, keeping a low profile, started the engine and gunned it out of there, not stopping until she reached town.
With voice commands she gave GPS the address of the cabin she’d rented. Found the key in the magnet carrier stuck to the underside of a windowsill. Telling herself that maybe she needed to see a shrink. Maybe she really was imagining things that had no basis in reality.
Key in hand, she turned back to the silver sedan, intending to get her suitcase to wheel with her into the house so she didn’t have to come back outside again until she had herself under control—had a shower—and maybe slept a bit more—
And that’s when she saw it.
The bullet stuck just above the wheel well in the passenger side metal of her car.
Jackson Redmond didn’t usually make house calls. Not since he’d succeeded his father and taken over as Sheriff of Evergreen County, with jurisdiction over the town of Evergreen. But when Officer Lily Higley, the most junior of his sixteen law enforcement agents, had told him that a call had come in about a shooting on the Evergreen estate land, he’d thanked her for bringing it to him and grabbed his keys.
The last thing Boyd Evergreen needed was another hassle on his hands. The man had grown up serving the town and county named after his family. And had known more than his share of heartache. Lost his mother when he was still a kid, stood solid through his younger brother’s tragedy then his father died far too early. Boyd had taken up the reins of the Evergreen fortune with grace. He was a man Jackson’s father had respected. One Jackson had grown up respecting.
And most recently, the secluded mental institution Boyd’s younger brother had been in for almost thirty-five years had burned in a brush fire. Grayson, who was in his late forties, had been happy in the facility—set as it was in the Arizona wilderness—where he’d been able to hike and fish, every day. He was having some problems in the Phoenix facility to which the patients had been moved.
Boyd, his twenty-five-year-old son Matthew, who’d left Evergreen with his mother after his parent’s divorce, and Grayson, were the town’s founding family’s last living members.
So, yeah, he’d drop what he was doing to investigate the complaint himself.
In his usual dark blue uniform, short sleeved for the summer months, he rapped on the door of the rental cabin—one of six in the little cul-de-sac complex set off on a couple of acres of trees in front of one of the areas smaller lakes. Blooming Bridges was a newer such offering in a town whose population exploded during the summer months. So this newest visitor, Aimee Barker, was only one of the 25,000 tourists he and his deputies had to contend with that June morning.
Putting his Evergreen welcoming smile on his face as the door clicked open, he faltered a bit when he got a glimpse of the woman standing in front of him.
He’d been expecting someone much older. Blooming Bridges catered to the over fifty-five population giving the semblance of getting back to nature with none of the work that went along with really doing so. Each of the six cabins had wood-burning fireplaces, for Evergreen’s cool evenings, but she’d never have to haul a log or clean a grate, either. At Blooming Bridges that was all done for her. Daily.
She thought she’d been shot at as she’d driven her rental from the Flagstaff airport into town. More likely, there’d be some other explanation for the sound she’d heard. With her not being from around the area, a lot of things could seem strange at first.
She wasn’t older. And he was standing there staring like someone who hadn’t seen a woman from outside Evergreen in...he shook his head.
“I’m Sheriff Jackson Redmond,” he said, regaining control of his senses, hoping his few-second lapse hadn’t been noticed. “You want to tell me about the gunshot you heard?”
She nodded, opened the door, held it for him to enter and as he passed by her slim figure, he caught a whiff of something aromatic that ignited another part of him that had no business coming to life as he entered the small cabin’s one main room.
So, yeah, she was pretty darn good-looking. Tall and slender frame visible in a tight black skirt, down to the bare, polished toes in sandals with glitzy junk on the straps.
“I was several yards in from the road,” she started, standing just inside the door with him, and he felt another jolt. Her voice...it was a little deeper than the high pitch he’d imagined. And husky. Like she’d either just gotten out of bed, or had a cold, except that it was pretty clear it was just her normal voice. She wasn’t sniffling or red-eyed or red-nosed either, for that matter. And no one got out of bed with their makeup looking that good.
And her words finally made it to his brain.
“You were out of your car?” he asked, his gaze homing in on her expression, rather than her beauty. Her frown made her concern obvious. And then his cop instincts finally booted up. “What were you doing several yards in from the road?” He’d been told the shot came from the Evergreen estate. He’d assumed she’d been driving by.
Lazy cop work, assuming things. Something he, like his father before him, didn’t abide.
The way she immediately looked away put his cop senses further on alert. She was up to something she didn’t want him knowing about.
So why call the police?
“I found the address written down among my aunt’s things...wanted to know why she had it... I thought there’d be a house there or something. Who has an address just for a piece of land?” Pulling a piece of paper out of the back pocket of her skirt, she then handed it to him.
He knew the road. Didn’t recognize the number. It fell right between two that designated Evergreen property. Which made it part of the Evergreen estate. There was no mistaking that. “This must be some mistake,” he said.
Her shrug kind of left the question hanging there. Like she wasn’t arguing his point, but needed a more definitive answer.
He’d get back to that.
“Tell me what you heard,” he said. Get that out of the way, first.
“I heard two shots,” she said. “One right after the other. I dove for the ground immediately, but one whizzed close enough by me that I was aware of it.”
Frowning, he studied her. “You’re saying an actual bullet came close enough to hitting you that you felt it?”
“Or heard it. It all happened so fast...”
She was telling him he’d almost had a dead body on his hands? He scrambled for other explanations.
“I wish I could tell you more, but I was...there was this tree...it reminded me of something and I was kind of caught up with that...”
She met his gaze head-on. Held steady. And he still sensed hesitation about her.
Which made him doubt her story. That and the fact that bullets flying on Boyd’s land made little sense. The man wasn’t a hunter. Nor did he allow hunters on his property.
“And yet you drove here and checked in, before calling the police?” She’d said she’d been lost in a memory at an address that didn’t exist. Could she be imagining the shots she’d heard?
“I drove away because I had to get out of there and I wanted to be inside where I felt safe. I made sure I wasn’t followed. And the key was waiting for me here. I checked in online.”
She made good sense.
“I figure someone didn’t want me trespassing on their land,” she offered. “I don’t want to press charges, because... I didn’t have permission to be there and should have thought about that instead of getting lost in my own needs. I just have to make a report because of the rental car.”
“The rental car?”
“Sorry, other than a couple of uncomfortable hours on the plane, I haven’t slept since I got up yesterday morning. A bullet is lodged just above the back wheel well of my rental car. I’ll need an offical report from the sheriff’s office for insurance purposes.”
She had a bullet?
She had a bullet.
And that changed everything.
